{"id":10005,"date":"2015-05-24T13:43:01","date_gmt":"2015-05-24T20:43:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/?p=10005"},"modified":"2015-05-24T13:43:37","modified_gmt":"2015-05-24T20:43:37","slug":"sowbelly-canyon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/2015\/05\/24\/sowbelly-canyon\/","title":{"rendered":"Sowbelly Canyon"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of my favorite places and one of my favorite place names — but Sowbelly wasn’t especially Prius-friendly the other day after the snow. So we took just a quick, chilly walk into the top of the canyon before heading west.<\/p>\n

\"Rick<\/a><\/p>\n

It was quiet up there, a circumstance that only convinced me there were\u00a0really\u00a0<\/em>great birds down lower; but it’s hard to complain about fences lined with\u00a0mountain bluebirds<\/strong> and Brewer’s blackbirds<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

A distant\u00a0Pheucticus\u00a0<\/em>song was neatly identified when a male\u00a0black-headed grosbeak\u00a0<\/strong>flew in to investigate our presence; both species occur in spring on the Pine Ridge, and — confession time — I can’t consistently tell the songs apart, and these\u00a0ears of mime don’t always pick up those chip notes at a distance.<\/p>\n

\"Red-headed<\/a><\/p>\n

We were hoping for Lewis’s — it’s just time for that species to arrive — but had to content ourselves with the even more stunning red-headed woodpeckers<\/strong>; the bird\u00a0is common all across Nebraska, wherever there are trees or fence posts, but it’s still a bit disconcerting to see it against a background of shortgrass prairie and buttes.<\/p>\n

And even more disconcerting to look down the fence and see a\u00a0Cassin’s kingbird<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

\"Cassin's<\/a><\/p>\n

These no-longer-quite-so-southwestern tyrants breed in the upper canyon (and even farther north into Dakota, if I remember right), but\u00a0I’d resigned myself to their late arrival when this one suddenly appeared. Who knows — this may have been the first of its species to make it to Nebraska this year. And it couldn’t have chosen a more beautiful place to land.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of my favorite places and one of my favorite place names — but Sowbelly wasn’t especially Prius-friendly the other day after the snow. So we took just a quick, chilly walk into the top of the canyon before heading west. It was quiet up there, a circumstance that only convinced me there were\u00a0really\u00a0great birds … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Sowbelly Canyon”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[138,124,599,477,479],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10005"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10005"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10005\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10007,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10005\/revisions\/10007"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/birdaz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}